Map Wallpaper lets you get your location at a glance

Last Saturday I got the chance to check out a Hackathon down in San Diego. It was a great event and I’ll be telling you guys about that later on. But the app that won the overall hackathon is now in the Windows Phone Store. Map Wallpaper is a clever lockscreen app that gives you your current location at a glance. Let’s check it out.

We sat around our virtual Windows Phone Central meeting room and couldn’t come up with any other apps that take over your lockscreen like this. Map Wallpaper will display your location on the lockscreen. It updates every half hour with your location. There are two variables that you control when setting up the app: map source and scale. There are a variety of maps to choose from and different scales to select.

Maps Basic:

Street Map

Aerial

USGS Topographic

Radar on Aerial Imagery

Radar on Street Map

Extra maps for $0.99

Street Bing Maps with optional traffic

Aerial Bing Maps with optional traffic

While most of you will be content with the free maps, you can unlock two Bing maps with optional traffic data for less than a dollar. This to me is where the app is super handy. If you’re working and heading out of the office you can just glance at your lockscreen to get an idea of traffic in your area before deciding to jump on the freeway. There’s a healthy selection of maps to choose from, but more is on the way! Try out the topographic map if you’ve got interesting hills and mountains around you.

Depending on the map you select you’ll have different levels to choose from when selecting the scale of the map. For example selecting the one of the radar maps with weather data will give you the option of region, medium region, large region, and continent. That’s because data from radar won’t be too helpful at the street level. Bing Maps as a counter example of the following scales available: Street, city, local region, region, and large region. One thing to keep in mind when selecting scale is battery life. If you select street level your phone will be using GPS to find your specific location. While if you select something a little higher up, like region, your phone can just use cellular data to get a rough estimate of its current location. That said, I’ve been using the app for two days at various scales and haven’t noticed any negative impact on battery life.

The app is free for Windows Phone 8, but will cost just $0.99 to get Bing Maps with traffic. For being version 1.0, Map Wallpaper works with aplomb. If you have any questions or feed back hit up Morten Nielsen, the dev behind Map Wallpaper.

Grab it right here in the Windows Phone Store, use the QR code below, or swipe to the right in our app.

Very Neat app. Might just be the answer to all my navigation needs. No need to unnlock the screen open the app, wait for recalibrations of the gps etc. Hopefully the developer will consider more maps outside the American continent. These are one of the great reasons for me to switch to a windows 8 Phone!

Kinda just wish I could do this lockscreen with Nokia Maps. That way I can use my offline map with gps without wasting data to find my location. However, I don't need my location on my lockscreen anyway...I usually know where I am and you still need to use apps for real navigation.

Good suggestion, but unfortunately not possible to convert Nokia Maps into a lockscreen image. Also the point of the app is not so much to show where you are (as you said you usually know that), but to give you a new fun map to look at, or show you current traffic or weather conditions.

Try choosing a larger scale (region for instance), and see if that helps. Getting your location at low level which requires high accuracy can sometimes take quite some time - especially when there's a poor reception.

Mine updated after 5 minutes this time, must be local cell related. Had to change lock screen timeout to allow acquisition to complete. Perhaps an action that takes this long should run in the background not be interruptible by lock screen or app going to background?

Speaking of the lock screen.... It's my understanding that developers are only able to get the lock screen to update every 30min... So,,, if the lock screen were able to be updated every fraction of a second then would we be able to have applications that could give us graphics on our lock screen?? Sure this would use a lot of resources resulting in battery drain, but that's not the point.. I'm just wondering if anyone has been able to get pass, "hack", that pesky 30min refresh interval.. Although I might not permanently enable graphics on my lock screen, or live tile- imagine that!,, it would be cool to see a WP device have animations. IDK, this sounds extremely possible to me.. Is it?

It's possible when you're testing to have the refresh down to seconds, but not fast enough for animations (when you update the lock screen it still takes 1-2 seconds for that to update). Anyway it will completely drain your battery in no time.

Well, Android devices have graphics on the lock screen, and home screen, and the XBM tile plays graphics when music is playing without "completely draining the battery in no time", So maybe my idea is stupid, or im suggesting going about it the wrong way, but I would like to see more basic graphics, like what the XBM, or Pictures tile do, on my WP device.. Maybe if there was some way of using GIFs.. IDK.. MS really needs to update the SDK with some fun features this time around.

The only way to get an app to update the lockscreen faster than once every 30 minutes (in an actual production app) would be to have it running as a background location tracking app. Then it could be running continuously. It still couldn't update much more than once per second or two though, and it would have to be actively tracking your location to stay active (or playing audio). For a mapping app though, you can't access the built in controls, so you need to download an image map. That means that on top of killing your battery, it would also be killing your data plan.

It does work in the UK. The rain radar data and topographic maps are for US only. Traffic data works whereever Bing Maps covers (which includes UK as far as I know). Unfortunately it's a little difficult to find good map services that are free or reasonably priced. I am looking for more though and will be adding as I find them